Benj@N69

Wednesday: week 4, day 3

Like yesterday, I slept until noon because I had stayed up most of the night. Can’t complain though, I ended up with quite some sleep. The exercise was more or less over for us, I had to go back to Bière, attend some rapports, then more rapports, and at 5 pm we had the exercise review with the brigadier general, brigade staff and the battalion commander.

The review of our unit was awful, the worst of all six involved. The guy who checked on us was quite obviously looking for the bad things, but who cares.

After the review, we returend the battalion flag. Like last year, only a handful of our unit could make it to the ceremony, and we were referred to as the “logistics platoon”. By the other company commanders. Jerks ;)

After the flag return, we had a last get together of all officers of the battalion, and later we returned for dinner and lots of setting up for tomorrow and Friday, because we’re returing all our material and vehicles.

A symbol of how well organised we are at the moment: the computer pictured is a $40’000.- piece of equipment, and nobody knew where it came from. Not until one of the radio guys said that they’ve unmounted it from their vehicle, because they thought it should be like that.

We also don’t really know where we have to return that stuff tomorrow… fun times guaranteed!

Tuesday: week 4, day 2

It’s past midnight again and I’m sitting through my shift in the civil protection shelter for the second night in a row. After writing this, I’ll make a tour of the outdoor guard posts and try to upload to tumblr - quite difficult with my network coverage here around.

Today started with me sleeping until noon, because I stayed awake all night. My breakfast was lunch, and after that we tried to fix the radio connection problems from yesterday. Without success, by the way.

Around 3 pm or so, we got a visit from a member of the brigade staff: a lieutenant colonel who happened to be my unit commander when I did my first repetition course in 2002. Funny to see him again. He told me to update a few things on the “leadership board”, among other a little drawing of our area set-up.

I went outside to start drawing; when I had reached the place where we’ve put our trucks, about 250 metres from the shelter, I got a call from the lieutenant who was still there, that they had about twelve “OPFOR civilians” there: soldiers in civil clothes who acted as the opposing force. Directly after the call, I saw how the two guards next to the trucks were kidnapped by more “civilians”. Strangely enough, they more or less ignored me, so I went back to the shelter.

The civilians were sitting in front of the entrance, blocking the gap in the barbwire. I went inside, and after a few minutes, their leader approached me with three demands: he wanted to have the truck keys within five minutes, connection to the battalion commander within ten minutes and within some hours that all the military would leave the area. Otherwise he’d kill the two hostages and blow up the vehicles.

Since I didn’t even have connection to the battalion myself (the radio problem, remember?), I had to call my captain with a cell phone. He happened to be near us but told me to ask for some more time. The “terrorists” returned, about 20 by now, and armed. Another leader repeated the demands and I told him again that we have to wait for the captain. The latter appeared after some time and was taken hostage, too. We handed out the keys and were ordered to disappear except two people who could stay outside.

Here, the lieutenant colonel halted the exercise and said that we now stay inside, the “terrorists” leave and we just wait how long it’d take the battalion to react. After some time, the situation was handled, the battalion would have asked the civil police to send special forces. In this type of operation, the armed forces are subordinated to the police.

Anyway, I was mainly annoyed at how it was impossible to react well. Apart from not being trained at all in these matters, our rules of engagement and non-existent equipment made the whole thing into a farce. Not to imagine how stressful it would be for a military (active reserve) leader to decide about people’s lives when put under such pressure.

In the evening, I had to do some recon work for tomorrow, which we hopefully won’t need, because the exercise ends tomorrow and changing place with this many people is just not much fun.

The picture shows one of the “hostages” after liberation, a bit sleepy, on the roof of a truck. Weather was okay today, by the way.

Weekend week 3

A rainbow dismissed us into our well deserved weekend. I didn’t sleep as much as last weekend and even managed to fit a short, but really nice bike ride into Sunday. And because my first triathlon takes place coming Sunday, I also went swimming, for the first time after two weeks.

Let’s just say: breast stroke it is for Sunday. Why kill myself with crawling and gaining 10 seconds on the first 50 metres, just to drown afterwards? I still want to learn front crawling, but it’s just not my time to shine until T1 yet ;)

Friday: week 3, day 5

After the morning roll call (I don’t really know the proper English military term, sorry), the battalion commander visited our unit for a little speech towards the soldiers. The infantry recruit school in the building next to ours had made national headlines, because somebody - most probably a soldier of our unit - sent a little movie of the promotion of the recruits to soldiers. To this end, they had to run around for about half an hour (not as in jogging, but as in sprint intervals, with boots), do countless push-ups, sing the national anthem, start all over with running and push-ups, singing, and so on.

Because this all took place directly in front of our building (about one week ago), we got premium seats to watch the whole show. I had to go inside to get a fewthigns done, just to miss the highlight of the “ceremony”: the recruits got their rank insignia, complete with a fist punch to the shoulder, and after that, six of them got whipped. The video is by now also online, check it out here.

The responsibles later said that it was all staged, including the video. That the whip was no iron chain, but just a piece of fabric. That it actually weren’t recruits, but officer candidates.

I haven’t seen all of it, but quite enough to say that this is complete and utter bullshit. All staged? Yeah right. By now, a second video has surfaced, showing the fist punching, so the “all staged” version is even less credible now.

Anyway, the battalion commander came to us to explain that he wanted to talk to the creator of the video, because sending something like that directly to the press is of course the wrong behaviour. In principle, taking pictures and videos is not allowed in the army, but it’s very common that people do it anyway. See this blog. The idea is to prevent the spread of media that would cast a damning light on the army, which I don’t think mine do.

Nobody stepped forward, but the battalion commander left his number and encouraged contacting him.

The rest of the day was not very eventful: the truck drivers drove around, I finished up some paperwork, and we prepared the big final exercise of next week. Not really, but we should have.

Towards the evening, our favourite recruit school set up another show for us: the daily cleaning of shoes and rifles was combined with walking across each othersstomachs, with boots and everything. Because the idiots now know that somebody of us made them look pretty bad nation-wide, they greeted us with their trademark shout, “Auf die Dauer - MINENPOWER!”, roughly “in the long run - mortar power!”, because they’re mortar soldiers. For the last shouts, the head shouter even turned around to us, so flattering! Friendly as we are, we gave a round of applause, but only earned a bird flipped at us. How rude.

Because we did some terribly good work, we were sent into the weekend on Friday evening already. Everybody was ready to go, only the captain was missing. He was busy with one last interrogation. Awesome timing, sir! After about 20 minutes, also this was over with, and we could leave.

One more week to go!

Thursday: week 3, day 4

I slept until almost noon (the exercise, remember?) - on the floor of the rapport room. Very uncomfy. But I got a few hours of sleep in.

The rest of the exercise was very uneventful for us: we delivered some ammo, ordered parts of our unit back because it was obvious that they should come back (even though the battalion forgot them) and around 5 pm called it a day.

After the, we had the exercise “GRILLIERO” - barbecue with the whole battalion, see picture. From where we were eating, you could even see Mont Blanc in France!

Later in the evening, we went out with a few officers and the two quarter master sergeants - one of the platoon leaders and one of the quarter master sergeants had their last day. It was going to be a short night!

GPOYW: I’m definitely going to sleep very very soon edition

Wednesday: week 3, day 3

Today, we started another exercise with the whole battalion, lasting for about 24 hours. In the morning, I was sent to do some recon work for the part of our unit that was sent away later, and at 10 am we had the issue of orders. The rest of the morning I spent thinking about how I wanted to set up my platoon.

After lunch, we assembled the platoons, checked equipment (they all had to bring stuff as if they would sleep somewhere else for at least a night, even though we’re actually based in our normal building) and tried to give an overview of the exercise. As this kind of exercise usually consists of lots of waiting for the soldiers, they often don’t see any purpose in doing them, which can be extremely tiring sometimes.

At 3 pm, we started setting up radio connections, and at 5 pm the exercise started, with parts of our unit already somewhere else. The comm systems took really long until we had connection to the battalion staff, but finally I think we managed ok. Almost nothing happened in our area so far, a staff officer once showed up and criticised some details and the captain showed up for a short time. He’s sleeping outside with the troops today, plus he’s totally turned into a good colleague of all platoon leaders and fist bumps to say goodbye and the like. (….?!)

Since either the deputy head of the unit or I have to be awake at all times, I’m pretty tired right now (it’s 4 am here) but I hope to get a few hours of sleep once the deputy gets up again.

The picture shows parts of what an INTAFF operator sees when working: the two radios used for voice and data transmission. Super exciting.

Tuesday: week 3, day 2

The day was full of short periods of not so much to do: all the soldiers were at work and I fought my little paper battles. In the morning, I drove a truck to a shooting range; I haven’t been driving truck for a while now and I hope the people on the bridge weren’t hurt too much. It was a short drive, I should add. At the range, we did some machine gun shooting with the howitzer 12.7 mm machine guns. I’ve never shot anything bigger than my assault rifle until now, so that was pretty impressive.

The afternoon was for me mainly about the little march for which I’ve done some recon work. We managed to assemble 50 people to walk; we’re actually not interested in bringing the ones that really don’t want, because why should we drag along some whino who just annoys everybody. Our captain didn’t make it to the start of the march as he was still with the battalion staff.

We were lucky with the weather, and the landscape in the region here is absolutely beautiful. We were a bit earlier than anticipated at the place where we’d planned dinner and dinner was a bit late, so we had to wait there, with a few not so happy people who would have preferred to continue walking. During dinner, we were joined by the captain (who was actually co-responsible for delaying the dinner) and the two staff guys from Friday who wanted to check on how we’re doing. I have to say that our captain really makes an effort to improve relations to the platoon leaders.

After the march, we had a talk with the soldiers, mainly about the same things as always: they do good work but expose poor behaviour in terms of how they wear their uniform, plus the last two nights there was trouble around “bed time”, i.e., we didn’t know whether everybody was around or not. Today, everything worked fine (except one guy who thought he could just leave us for football training) and I think people try to improve on things.

As do we, we invited the captain for our bed time beer. We’re so kind.

Monday: week 3, day 1

If I were

• a good soldier of my unit: I got up at 0600 am for shaving and breakfast. At 0700 I attended the daily morning presence control of the unit, in my sports outfit because I knew afterwards there’d be sports. After one hour of sports, I joined the unit working place on maching gun handling, rifle shooting and some more basic soldier skills. It lasted until the end of the afternoon; afterwards, I cleaned my rifle but didn’t grease it yet because I know that tomorrow there’ll be the weapon inspection. After that, I had a shower, put on my dress uniform and enjoyed the evening going out.
• the typical INTAFF (artillery guidance system) operator in my platoon: I got up at 0645, just in time to be around at the daily morning presence control. Because I didn’t bother to bring my sports clothes, I didn’t join sports, instead I went back to bed. At 0900, my stupid ass platoon leader took me out of bed again so I could join the unit working place. I went there but refused to shoot my rifle and to do any machine gun handling exercise. As soon as I got back, I put on my B uniform because I didn’t bring the dress uniform, went out and got completely hammered.
• myself: I behaved like a good soldier until after the morning presence control. Then I attended an issue of orders with the captain. I wanted to know how many vehicles I should do scouting for today; it took about half an hour to clear that issue. Afterwards, I had to look for my recon squad, and then I had to wake people still in bed even though they were supposed to join the unit working place.

The rest of the day I spent driving around with the recon motorcyclists, saying things like “next week we’re having an exercise, could we please stay at your place with 40 soldiers and 8 trucks? No? Really? Too bad, but thank you anyway!” But at the 11th or so place, we were successful, so I think there’s something ready for next week now. This finding had to be visualised on 10 slides of course, which had to be faxed to the battalion. After that, I went out to have dinner. The evening ended with the battalion commander pulling me away from my beer (together with 3 colleagues), saying that he thinks he’s talking against a wall, showing an iPhone picture of the building where the soldiers sleep, all lit up. We left our half full beers and checked all the rooms to create some more darkness. And I wrote this in my room, but because I have no network up here, I’ll upload it only tomorrow.

The picture shows the view from the place we finally found: Romainmôtier. Actually really beautiful.